I was in the right place at the right time. I was asked, "I have two Zynq®-7000 SoC ZC702 Evaluation Kits, would you like them?" For one second I paused, and declared," YES!"

So, here I am, sitting at my desk in the element14 offices in Chicago with two fairly big boxes to giveaway to the right people. Don't know much about the Zynq®-7000 SoC ZC702 Evaluation Kit? Let me fill you in a bit: It has all components of hardware, design tools, IP, and pre-verified reference designs to enable you to build a complete embedded processing platform. It includes pre-verified reference designs and industry-standard FPGA Mezzanine Connectors (FMC) allow scaling and customization with daughter cards. A picture is worth a thousand, so here's a short video for you to take a look-

I'd like to get some ideas or proposals for an embedded project that uses these kits. Consider the proposals like a Design challenge for Programmable Devices -- something we haven't done yet. What would you build or Prototype? Tell me the how's and why's of it. I don't expect you to change the world, but I'd like to use these kits for a project with a WoW factor. Please enter your project idea in the comment section below.

Nice idea, are you thinking of performing some resource intensive processing on the data as well, like implementing the learning algorithm, do the training and generate the model, on the Zynq or just to generate the training data sets?

That is a very capable board with a great range of FMC addon boards. As a stand alone system (albeit perhaps with addition of a low-cost PMod card) I would like to see the following built:

Logic and Protocol Analyser.

It could utilise that huge 1GByte of DDR3 RAM to create a circular buffer for a raw data capture or be configured to only record filtered bytes and to time tag them...therefore allowing a much greater capture time.

The stored data could be analysed to several of the main protocols easily e.g. SPI, I2C, UART, CAN. Serial data on a single line or just a few lines would be easiest to build for as it would require less wiring than a parallel capture.

The embedded ARM cores could be utilised to run Linux - to control the faster FPGA Programmable Logic areas of the FPGA and to allow data to be manipulated via the user command lines e.g. they could SSH into this board from any terminal application and run a bespoke script - that script would interface to the registers of the Logic and Protocol Analyser. Functions could be as simple as start/stop and setting up the trigger bytes or sequences of bytes to look for.

It would be a very powerful system - and of course a fun and functional project as any homemade test equipment becomes.

Analog Devices makes SDR boards and even supplies an image for the ZC702 (decimator + interface logic in the FPGA, and Linux + other software on the ARM), and even provides the HDL source. The image allows users to stream data from the RF transceiver to a host PC to a software like GNU Radio/Matlab (via the FPGA + ARM) for processing i.e. implementation of filters or other SDR blocks required for Rx/Tx.

To start with, consider a spectogram (or waterfall plot). Software like GNURadio, Baudline and Inspectrum can be used on the host PC, but the limitation is the bandwidth of the USB 2.0/Ethernet connection, and in many cases the processing power of the host PC - especially when doing a large FFT.

While most of this is usually done in software (for ease of use/flexibility), moving the pre-processing/FFT to the FPGA would be interesting because of the performance benefits (the sampling rate & FFT size will not longer be limited by connection to, & processing power of the host), and instead of streaming the data to the PC, it could be displayed on a monitor or TV using the ZC702's HDMI port. Combine this with a simple control/trigger system (either using UART or a couple of GPIO), it could be designed to capture/stream data to the host only when certain conditions are met eg. a UART transfer to/from a radio module.

I've got access to a FMCOMMS3-EBZ which has a tuning range of 70Mhz to 6 Ghz, and upto 56Mhz of bandwidth, and since the ZC702 has 2 FMC connectors, it might be able to plug in two of these to get >100Mhz of bandwidth.

I would use it for building petalinux images. I am pretty confident in Vivado and HLS and recently I started a project on building an image from scratch. I had assumed with a little bit of reading I would be able to tackle Yocto.

Boy, I have never been so wrong in my entire life. It is an absolute different ball game together. The only tutorials on petalinux is on the ZC702 board ... which (since it is a Xilinx product ofc) is 1000 bucks :<

It's basically a percussion synthesizer but needs hardware capable of running multiple correlators at audio frequencies as well as capturing waveforms : this might be possible using processor resources but an FPGA would be less constrained. The processors would be needed for supervision, synthesis and running machine learning algorithms to gauge the player's intentions (more details in private mail if you wish as I don't want to talk about it too publicly until I've made some progress).

The expected market is initially an art installation but I have hopes that it could expand to be a product - either for musicians in a stage format or, more interestingly, as a public installation piece that might be installed anywhere people play - perhaps a park or a public square.

I am working on my master thesis as an ASIC tester based on the zynq-7000 but with 2 separate system, to testing and verifying the functionality of every ASICs before released. That is the big Project, but for now, I am designing the platform and basements.

well, the raw idea is testing every functionality of commercial ASICs before realizing in the marketCurrentlly I am looking for sponsorship, and pieces of equipment as well as designing mainboard, peripherals and...

1. As I am new to Programming Programable Logic, I would start by doing a Series of Tutorial on Programmable Logic and FPGA.

(Didn't got a chance to work on these babies till date, so I would love to do some justice here)

2. As far as projects go, I will start with Mini Projects To include the following(these will be part of the Tutorials mentioned above :-

(a) Basic IO, RTC , Serial and Parallel Protocols. (With Tech Growing So Rapidly, I always wanted a way to demonstrate progress we have made in the past going from Parallel to Serial to High speed bus. This is perfect kit to do so.)

(b) Next set will focus on Advance Interface (Connectivity) i.e. Giving the Boards its senses and make the board do things preceding to make it an Embedded System. (This part will focus on Interfaces and Connectivity including Motor driving, Analog Interfaces, HDMI Out and many more.)

3. As an Embedded System, I would design a Self Learning Predictive Maintenance and Preventive System which could do the following,

(a) Classify the Person using the system.

(b) Gather the usage pattern and the Train the Neural Net (Accelerated)

(c) Suggest Maintenance Schedules and Predict Failures.

(d) Save Valuable Money Ofcource

Thanks & Regards,

GS Gill

P.S. >> I really want to enter the domain of Programable Logic, and am really desperate to dive deep into this domain. So, I am really sorry for being the cause of Delay in your decision Randall Scasny.

I was in the right place at the right time. I was asked, "I have two Zynq®-7000 SoC ZC702 Evaluation Kits, would you like them?" For one second I paused, and declared," YES!"

So, here I am, sitting at my desk in the element14 offices in Chicago with two fairly big boxes to giveaway to the right people. Don't know much about the Zynq®-7000 SoC ZC702 Evaluation Kit? Let me fill you in a bit: It has all components of hardware, design tools, IP, and pre-verified reference designs to enable you to build a complete embedded processing platform. It includes pre-verified reference designs and industry-standard FPGA Mezzanine Connectors (FMC) allow scaling and customization with daughter cards. A picture is worth a thousand, so here's a short video for you to take a look-

I'd like to get some ideas or proposals for an embedded project that uses these kits. Consider the proposals like a Design challenge for Programmable Devices -- something we haven't done yet. What would you build or Prototype? Tell me the how's and why's of it. I don't expect you to change the world, but I'd like to use these kits for a project with a WoW factor. Please enter your project idea in the comment section below.